Biden says US needs fair tax code to ‘make this country great’ in speech on $7.3tn budget plan – as it happened

Joe Biden is issuing a budget plan Monday aimed at getting voters’ attention: tax breaks for families, lower healthcare costs, smaller deficits and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

Unlikely to pass the House and Senate to become law, the proposal for fiscal 2025 is an election-year blueprint about what the future could hold if Biden and enough of his fellow Democrats win in November. The president and his aides previewed parts of his budget going into last week’s State of the Union address, with plans to provide the fine print on Monday.

If the Biden budget became law, deficits could be pruned $3tn over a decade. Parents could get an increased child tax credit. Homebuyers could get a tax credit worth $9,600. Corporate taxes would jump upward, while billionaires would be charged a minimum tax of 25%.

Biden also wants Medicare to have the ability to negotiate prices on 500 prescription drugs, which could save $200bn over 10 years.

All of this is a chance for Biden to try to define the race on his preferred terms, just as the all-but-certain Republican nominee, Donald Trump, wants to rally voters around his agenda.

Joe Biden is heading to the competitive election state of New Hampshire today where he is expected to call on Congress to lower health care costs for American families before later participating in a campaign event.

The president is due to fly into Manchester this afternoon, and is scheduled to deliver a speech in Goffstown where he will call for lawmakers to apply his $2,000 cap on drug costs and $35 insulin to everyone, not just people who have Medicare, AP reported.

Biden will also seek to make permanent some protections in the Affordable Care Act that are set to expire next year, it said.

A coalition of progressive organizations has announced a fundraising, lobbying and organizing effort to counter the influx of spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) into primary campaigns against progressive Democrats.

The effort, called Reject Aipac, is in part a response to the ongoing congressional support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Among the groups involved in the campaign are the progressive group Justice Democrats, the advocacy arm of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Sunrise Movement climate organization.

“We have watched as Aipac has done everything it can to silence growing dissent in Congress against Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza,” said the coalition in a statement, “even as Democratic voters overwhelmingly support a ceasefire and oppose sending more blank checks to the Israeli military.”

Aipac has stayed out of the fray during election campaigns for most of its existence, focusing its efforts instead on shoring up bipartisan support for Israel in Congress – with a focus on military spending. That has changed in recent years. Now, the organization is expected to drop $100m during the 2024 election cycle in an effort to oust candidates it views as insufficiently pro-Israel.

11 Mar 202410.37 EDT

Dani Anguiano

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in the US, poured more than $4.5m into an Orange county congressional race in hopes of keeping Dave Min from advancing to the November election.

But on Tuesday, the California state senator did exactly that – outpacing his Democratic competitor Joanna Weiss to come in second in the primary for the seat of Congresswoman Katie Porter.

The seat is crucial to Democrats hoping to wrestle control of the House of Representatives from Republicans. Come November, Min will face off with Republican Scott Baugh to represent the southern California district in the House.

But Aipac’s massive spending in Orange county has perplexed analysts and Min himself.

“Why the hell did you come in against me? We’re trying to understand why,” Min said in an interview with Semafor. “Maybe AIPAC wants a rubber stamp. I’m not going to be a rubber stamp.”

Aipac has spent millions of dollars against progressive candidates who have been critical of Israel this year and in recent election cycles. But the conflict in the Middle East was not a major issue in the primary race.

Donald Trump has confirmed that he met with Elon Musk, following a report that the former president was seeking a major cash infusion for his latest re-election campaign.

Trump was asked if he thought he would get the Tesla CEO’s support in an interview with CNBC this morning. Trump replied:

I don’t know. I’ve been friendly with him over the years. I’ve helped him. When I was president I helped him. I’ve liked him.

The New York Times reported last week that Trump and Musk held a private meeting in Palm Beach along with a few wealthy Republican donors. Musk later said he is not donating to either Trump nor Joe Biden.

Peter Navarro, a top former Trump administration official, has been ordered to report to a Miami prison on 19 March to begin serving a four-month sentence for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol attack.

Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September 2023 of two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to produce documents and testimony in the congressional investigation into the Capitol attack, claiming that executive privilege protections meant he did not have to cooperate.

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The committee took a special interest in Navarro because of his proximity to Trump and his involvement in a series of efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including to have members of Congress throw out the results in a plot he named “the Green Bay Sweep”.

But Navarro’s subpoena defiance prompted a criminal referral to the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which brought the charges and ultimately asked for six months in jail because he brazenly ignored the subpoena even after being told executive privilege would not apply.

Navarro was the second Trump aide convicted of contempt of Congress charges. The former White House adviser Steve Bannon previously received a four-month sentence but is free pending appeal.

The Washington Post published a factcheck report which deemed that Senator Katie Britt had misled voters in her rebuttal speech to Joe Biden’s State of the Union.

The Post concluded that while the story of Karla Jacinto Romero is “tragic and may be evocative of other Mexican girls trapped in the sex trade in that country”, adding:

But she was not trafficked across the border – and her story has nothing to do with Biden.

The report also pointed out that Donald Trump, when president, had made similar misleading claims that “thousands of young girls and women” were being trafficked across the border.

In an investigation, the Post found that most sex trafficking cases involve legal border crossings, visa fraud and air travel, rather than people smuggled across the border.

Karla Jacinto Romero, the woman whose story Katie Britt appeared to have shared in the GOP response to the State of the Union, slammed the Alabama senator for inaccurately using her story to highlight the Biden administration’s border control policies.

Asked if she felt her story had been used for “political purposes” in the US, Romero told CNN on Sunday:

I hardly ever cooperate with politicians, because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo – and that to me is not fair.

She confirmed that she was never trafficked in the US, as Britt appeared to suggest, and that she was not trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, but by a pimp who operated as part of a family that entrapped vulnerable girls to force them into prostitution.

Romero said she was kept in captivity from 2004 to 2008, when George W Bush was in office. She added that Mexican politicians had taken advantage of her by using her story for political purposes, and that it had happened again in the US.

People who are really trafficked and abused, as [Britt] mentioned. And I think she should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.

On Sunday, Republican senator Katie Britt addressed the story she told during her rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, in which she invoked a story about child rape that she implied resulted from the president’s handling of the ongoing crisis at the southern US border.

In her first interview since her widely ridiculed response, Britt refused to apologize for the story even though the abuse occurred years earlier in Mexico while her party controlled the White House. Appearing on Fox News, she denied hiding the fact that the rape and sex trafficking case to which she referred had actually occurred during the presidency of George W Bush.

Asked whether she intended to give the impression that the abuse occurred under the Biden administration’s watch, she said:

I very specifically said … I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12. So I didn’t say a teenager – I didn’t say a young woman. [It was] a grown woman … trafficked when she was 12.

She added:

To me, it is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked.

Britt’s guest spot on Fox News Sunday came hours after the actor Scarlett Johansson stood in a kitchen portraying the Alabama senator and satirized the latter’s State of the Union rebuttal on Saturday Night Live’s cold open. Among other things, Johansson said sarcastically:

I’ve invited you into this empty kitchen because Republicans want me to appeal to women voters and women love kitchens.

Good morning US politics readers. A sex trafficking victim has criticized the Republican senator Katie Britt after the lawmaker inaccurately used her story in her rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address as part of an attack on his border control policies.

In that speech, Britt described traveling to the Del Rio sector of the US-Mexico border and cited the case of a woman who had been sex-trafficked at age 12 and raped multiple times. The senator implied these were a direct result of the ongoing crisis at the border, which Republicans have sought to exploit as a campaign issue.

Britt’s communications director confirmed that she was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who has publicly recounted her experiences on numerous occasions at the hands of sex traffickers in her native Mexico. In May 2015, Romero testified to a congressional subcommittee describing her experiences at the hands of a trafficker who held her captive between the ages of 12 and 16, before she was eventually rescued.

Romero, in an interview with CNN on Sunday, said legislators lack empathy when using the issue of human trafficking for political purposes. She said:

I hardly ever cooperate with politicians, because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo – and that to me is not fair.

On Sunday, Britt sought to defend her comments, arguing that she had not intended to suggest that the trafficking and rape in question had happened Biden’s watch. The senator told Fox News she had recounted the victim’s story to “bring some light to” sex trafficking by cartels.

Here’s what is happening today:

• 11am. Joe Biden will deliver remarks to the National League of Cities at the Marriott Marquis in DC.

• 11.45am. Biden will depart DC for Manchester, New Hampshire

• 2.30pm. The Senate intelligence committee has an open hearing on worldwide threats. The House rules committee will meet to prepare several measures for floor consideration.

• 2.30pm. Biden will deliver remarks on lowering costs for American families in Goffstown, New Hampshire.

• 3.35pm. Biden will participate in a campaign event in Manchester.